Lockdown Drawing Challenge
Personal Work
I had found a beautiful used diary from the 1930s in a wonderful secondhand books and ephemera shop, and decided to utilise it in a drawing challenge in 2020. When the first lockdown happened in Melbourne, it proved a wonderful source of inspiration and gave me some sense of accomplishment during this dark period.
Loath to actually draw on (and ruin!) these precious vintage papers, I scanned each page and cleaned it up before commencing to draw with digital ink.
One of the things I love most about drawing with traditional (real) ink is the happy accidents that occur, and the way ink swirls and blends so spontaneously, so it was a real challenge to purposefully recreate this effect using a pen and tablet. I found it quite anti-intuitive to actively think about changing Photoshop brushes in order to emulate a particular effect, to make ‘accidental’ splatters, or to drop ‘water’ into a section ‘loaded with ink’.
The biggest compliment an artist friend once paid me was to say she thought my digital ink drawings were real.
